I've been noticing lately a big increase in spam in one of my Gmail accounts. It's understandable since I use this address for things that would probably garner high volumes of spam (use your imagination). When I go to delete my junk email folder, I skim the emails in sight to see if a legit one got tossed there by accident (so far, none have. Go Gmail!). I see a lot of emails where the sender is "me;" I know I didn't send these, but what about other people? Many of these include subjects such as "re: order number [enter random number]" or something about jobs.
I find it interesting that spam email is evolving and growing more intelligent. I guess in the scheme of things this is understandable, but I'm sick of it. Hackers, phishers, spammers, etc need to get a life. It's bull that they spend their time trying to steal people's money and identity instead of getting a real job. I can't stand people like that. And most of the victims are those who don't know any better because they're not very internet-savvy, and then they get taken advantage of. You might say "Well, it's their own dumb fault," but in many cases it isn't.
To my knowledge, there aren't classes that educate people about this sort of thing, and some people don't have the common sense to not click on such emails. It's like the AIM/Facebook scams that come from a friend, trying to get you to click on a link. Well, not everyone will know that this is a virus and by clicking on it they're harming their computer.
Because all of this is so new to most people, there needs to be more to protect the average internet user. I'm not talking about restricting or filtering the internet or anything like it. I'm talking education and awareness. I think most branded computers come with some sort of anti-virus software, and many ISPs provide AV software, but most of it is either a trial or of poor quality, and most people won't want to spend money on a product they don't think they need.
Sure, there are people out there--like blackhats turned good (white? don't really like the whole color connotation)--who are working to help fix massive flaws in the internet. However, even more people are looking for and making ways to exploit flaws. I recently read an article on wired.com about a hacker who was helping companies protect their networks, and then turned around and exploited them: he actually created backdoors in the patch he was making. Afterwards, he took over carder sites (websites that sell ill-gotten identities and credit card numbers) to control this whole illegal segment of the internet. He never profitted from it, but it brings up the whole "awareness" them again. These sites are there because people are careless and are having their identity stolen. Again, you could say it's their own dumb fault, and sometimes it is, but not always. Many times this happens without the victim doing anything wrong; simply buying dinner at a restaurant can lead to stolen credit card numbers.
It's not, however, the identity theft that concerns me; most banks offer some sort of protection against this, even for the lowest-level bank accounts. I'm more concerned about people having their computers taken over by hackers and having important information deleted: family photos, blogs, creative writing pieces. (But of course, identity information is also thrown into here.) I would imagine that more than 65% of people don't create backups of their data; not because they're too lazy, but because they don't think they need to or know they should.
This all connects into how clevier phishers are getting. Email provers like Gmail do have good spam filters, but what about the ones that don't? And what happens if people click on these emails any way (again, their own dumb fault, perhaps, but that's besides the point)? I think something needs to be done about this. There needs to be more to educate the masses about internet safety, and there needs to be stricter cyberspace laws. Of course, the latter is close to irrelevency since most people don't get caught for minor phishing scams. If a person phyically steals something from someone, the police will investigate and attempt to imprison the robber (you can also view this with property damage and any number of other crimes). But if it happens online? Well, there's a tracability issue, and it's harder to track these people down to prosecute them. It appears as though the FBI is the primary law enforcement agency of the internet, but they also don't appear to care about smaller issues; they want the big crimes: millions of dollars stolen, all of Google's databases deleted (never happened, but you know what I'm getting at). Why is the internet any different from reality? Neighbor kills your dog, steals a hundred bucks from you, it gets reported, and police move to action. But a hacker breaks into your computer and completely wipes clean your hard drive and you've got no recourse.
I just answered part of this problem. What happens if a hacker breaks into your computer and deletes all your files? Apart from (possibly) crying, what do you do? Call the police? Call the FBI? I don't know, and I'm very proficient with computers. There might be something out there, and I don't know about it. If it's there, it's not advertised at all, and I've never seen anything like that posted here on EggXpert. Though, I've also not seen anything about identity theft or someone's computer being hacked into (have seen virus, issues, though). That leads me to believe that there is nothing like that out there, no Cyber Police. It should be there, and it should be oublicly known about. Clearly, right now it'd be hard to form up something like this due to the econmy, but something needs to be done. These b******s need catching and punishing.